


Awakenings

by airdeari



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games), Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward - Fandom, Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma - Fandom
Genre: #JusticeForKyleKlim2k28, (but confined to a single chapter that you could probably skip anyway), Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-08
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-08-13 23:01:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7989319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We know about the SHIFTs they made, but we never saw them from this side. The time traveling duo prepares to save the world.</p><p>i swear i'll take a break from writing so much ZE trash after this one. just one more guys. i promise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sigma woke up.  
  
Akane had told him, too many times, exactly what date and time he would be returning to this body and, of course, his next mission. Even after all that warning, he did not quite put it together that he would wake up in a cloud of white smoke, trapped inside his sabotaged car from 2028.  
  
The hooded figure in the gas mask stood behind the car, waiting for the gaseous Soporil to take hold. When the twenty-two-year-old body of Sigma Klim regained consciousness, he would have a sixty-seven-year-old mind. That was the plan, but the doctor had made the SHIFT much more cleanly than expected.  
  
He banged the window with his open palm, pulling the collar of his shirt over his mouth and nose. To the outside observer, however, he was no different from the young Sigma reacting in panic. There was a thin film of moisture on the inside of his car window, in which he saw his handprint and, thus, an idea.

As he hauled himself over the center console of the car, lunging for the backseat, he thought of the shortest thing he could write that would prove his identity. His vision blurred into a thick white, except where it faded black at the corners. When he felt the cool, wet glass of the back windshield, he wrote a single letter from a foreign alphabet: Φ.  
  
His memory of the next few minutes—were they really few?—faded into a haze. Eventually he was breathing air with a strange smell, different from the damp, chemical scent of Soporil. He felt pavement against his arms and a gas mask too small for his head pressed to his face.  
  
“You better be the doctor already, or she’s gonna kill me,” muttered Aoi Kurashiki.  
  
He blinked his eyes open, but he could barely see Aoi hovering over him through the shade of the mask’s goggles and the darkness of the early morning hours. Heavy as his body felt under Earth’s gravity, his arm lifted easily to make a thumbs-up. It moved fluidly at his will without depending on an imperfect relay between organic nerves and electrical wiring. Its porous organic bone was much lighter than the titanium alloy framework that made his artificial arms from the future.  
  
“So I got a visit from Santa on Christmas morning?” Sigma joked.  
  
His deep voice sounded comically lower through the voice modulation device inside the gas mask, which Aoi snatched away with a grimace. “She made that joke fifteen too many times for it to be funny anymore,” he grumbled. “Some Soporil leaked out the car, but you should be okay to breathe now. Can you move?”  
  
Sigma smiled as he sat up. His head was swimming, but his body was _young_. This was everything he had been working towards after forty-five years of something less than living. He thought of his internment on the moon as outside of his true life, and he lived like it, too, isolating himself from other people, divorcing himself from emotion, perhaps from reality. He had decided, in fact, that it was not reality, not if they were working towards the true future by creating the AB project. Now that he was back in 2028, he was resuming his real life.  
  
“What’s next?” Sigma asked, hauling his dizzy self to his feet. “We have to get into the Mars test site, right?”  
  
“Hold your horses, doc,” said Aoi. “We’re still missing someone.”


	2. Chapter 2

Phi woke up.

Unlike Sigma, she did not wake up quickly enough to find herself in a sea of white smoke. In fact, she collapsed before the anesthetic had physiologically claimed her. The mind entering her body had been sleeping for a very long time.

Instead, she woke in the drab hideaway that Crash Keys called their headquarters. Her body was laid on top of thin, starchy sheets fitted loosely to a shallow mattress. Unknown voices echoed from too far away to be understood. She turned her stiff neck towards the open door.

The memories took a while to return to her. Forty-five years stood between the events of the Nonary Game and her current reality, empty though they were. Images swam through her mind that she struggled to understand. She saw people she could not remember meeting, bombs in places she never remembered seeing—and why did she know they were bombs? Everything twisted together into one final memory of a knife coming at her chest, held by a woman whose voice was coming from down the hall.

It was not exactly her voice, or not as Phi remembered it. It was no longer so slow and labored, and it lacked the roughness brought on by age. When Phi wondered idly if she had gone back in time, she remembered his name, and with it, her mission.

“Sigma!” she shouted, shoving herself upright. The insides of her head seemed not to follow suit, banging against her skull. She pressed both hands to her scalp, wincing. Her body felt shaky and weak.

No one else in the room down the hall—a mess of computers, servers, power cords, Ethernet cables, and external drives devoted to hacking Dcom’s databases—heard her voice but Sigma. The faint sound sent his mind reeling back forty-five years for a dizzying moment. He darted into the hallway.

Her hair was a little longer than he remembered, and it was not as snowy-white. It needed a refresher with toner to eliminate the returning brassiness, though he, of course, could not have known any of that. He still thought this was her natural color.

Though Phi did not recognize the well-built young man frozen in the doorway, there was something familiar in his intense stare. She somehow knew it was not anger in his eyes, but fervent compassion. Her eyes drifted down to his blue shirt with the garish design.

“Oh my God,” she uttered. “You’re Sigma.”

She had not expected him to be so good-looking, in a fuckboy kind of way. His hair was charmingly shaggy, his skin had a California glow, and his cheekbones could still slice out someone’s eye, but in his youth, it strengthened his piercing, gray-eyed gaze.

“So you remember?” he asked. His voice, too, had lost the raggedness of old age and smoothed to velvet.

Phi rubbed her head, frowning. “It's… it's coming back,” she said slowly. “Nonary Game, going back to the past, stop Radical-6. Give me a minute.”

“Headache still?” he guessed, crouching by her bedside. “If it’s the Soporil, I can get you some aspirin. If it's from SHIFTing, you’re on your own, sorry.”

Everything faded away but the sound of his voice for a moment in which she fell a little faint. If she could miss someone while asleep, she had missed him, the man who had known nothing about her, who had no reason to trust her, and yet cared so deeply for her, and she for him.

“Phi, hey, hey!” he yelled when she wobbled forward. His hands were rough with calluses but warm against her shoulders. “You alright? Say something.”

When last she had felt his hand on her shoulder, it was softer, but colder. Then there was a sting on her upper arm, like a shot. As his eye drooped closed, he smiled weakly and told her he had given her the antidote to the muscle relaxant that was about to flood both of their bodies. There was only one dose, and he had given it to her.

“You saved my life,” she mumbled.

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” he said. “I’ve done that a few times, I think.”

She remembered his old form hunched over the input device in front of four different bombs, sweat beading on his forehead. He grinned like an idiot when the light went green for each one. She thought he was an idiot, but in truth, he had been a child, _this_ child, the twenty-two-year-old boy in front of her. And this twenty-two-year-old was no longer a boy, but an old man.

“You did it,” she realized. “You’ve done it all already. You spent forty-five years on the Moon and designed the AB Project.”

His face was stony as he nodded. At the thought of the boy spending half of a solitary century in the prison of time, her heart gave a wild throb. She winced, almost grabbed for it.

“It’s been a long time, Phi,” he sighed. “Although, from your perspective, it’s been nothing at all.”

“Miss me?” she asked, and she regretted it the moment she said it. She forced a joking smirk onto her face to goad him into joking back, into not saying exactly the kind of thing he said anyway.

“In a weird, kind of masochistic way, yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I told myself I was going to take a break and wait until tomorrow to edit & post this chapter but then I had to think about Adult Things so I needed to use writing as an emotional crutch.
> 
> Thanks to everyone on Tumblr who encouraged me to call Sigma a fuckboy. To mundetiam if you are reading this: since I unfortunately will not have the opportunity to talk about Dio in this piece, I will say it here. Dio is a fuckboy.
> 
> i just realized i may have misled some people into thinking this would be a silly chapter because of the tumblr straw poll and i'm sorry


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: suicidal thoughts/attempt  
> if you'd rather not read this chapter because of this, it shouldn't affect your understanding of the next chapter. you do you.

And then Phi woke up again.

She was on another thin mattress with starchy sheets, these ones mint green and too clean. The world was spinning around her. She shut her eyes, waiting for her consciousness to fully return.

She waited a long time.

She decided she felt fully alert when she closed her eyes and ignored the sound of strange voices. When she opened her eyes, people sped to and from her side. They looked at her as they spoke too quickly to hear more than every other word. Before she could piece together what was said, someone else had already said something new, or the other person walked away without waiting for a response, even though what they had said sounded like a question.

She did not know how long she lived like this. She could remember living like this before, in another timeline.

No, in _this_ timeline. In the future of the very timeline she had helped to create.

Her infected body had been the vessel that carried Radical-6 out of the Nevada Test Site on December 31, 2028. Sigma likely lay somewhere nearby in this bright hospital, missing both arms and a right eye. Everything they had worked so hard to change had happened anyway. The deadly AB Project, Sigma’s forty-five years of toil, had all been for nothing. As patient zero of the Radical-6 outbreak, Phi had, with her very existence, doomed Sigma to this cruel fate.

She wondered if others had already contracted her illness. Perhaps it was not too late to die, and take the disease down with her. Her room had turned light and dark several times, she thought too quickly to count the days, but everything was moving too quickly. In all likelihood, a week had passed, and the disease had already reached out from her body and claimed new hosts. Strangely, this did not quell her desire to take her own life.

There were so many reasons to die. First and foremost was guilt; she felt she needed to be punished for carrying Radical-6 into the outside world, and that her sentence should be the death penalty. Almost greater than the guilt was shame. Sigma had worked for forty-five years, only for her to ruin the future he sought to create. She never wanted to look him in the eyes again. She wondered if her death could save him from spending his life imprisoned on the moon. Her absence would ruin the predestined version of the Nonary Game. Deep down, she knew that her actions in the present could not change what she and Sigma had already experienced in the future, that her death would only cause another grim offshoot timeline. Despite this, she still craved the ecstasy of the end, for the sake of death itself.

She wondered first if she could strangle herself, if her overwhelming desire for death could overpower biological survival mechanisms. When she tried to bring her hands to her throat, they caught on something. She kicked off her sheets to find her hands bound together and tied to the railing of her hospital bed with the chain of a necklace. She could open her hands only an inch or two to see the bluebird pendant inside.

“HeytherePhiyoualrightIheardyourollingaroundohwhat’sthatonyourhands?”

A nurse slowed down beside her bed to detangle the necklace with gloved hands. He was there for only ten or twenty seconds to Phi, but for once, he stood still. He was a dark man with warm, brown eyes and long eyelashes. From the apples of his cheeks she could see that his surgical mask hid a gentle smile even as he concentrated on the pendant. She could even read the badge on his lanyard that said Matt.

“Therewegoohthat’ssuchaprettynecklacewhere’dyougetitisn’tthisyoursister’syoushouldkeepyoursheetsonit’sprettychillytonightdon’twanttocatchacoldontopofthishaha.”

The sheets were on top of her in the time it took her to blink. Jotting notes on a clipboard, Matt started checking on the bags hanging near her bedside, and that's when the inspiration struck. In her arm was an IV needle. It would slide easily through her skin, and once it was in and out of her—through the heart, a lung maybe—her life would melt away into the bliss of oblivion.

Her impatience for death saved her life. From her perspective, Matt would have left the room in seconds, but she could not stand to wait so long. She grabbed the needle and tore it out before his very eyes. He grabbed her hands before she could even move towards her chest.

“Heywhatareyoudoingstopstop _stop_ shit _hey_ someonehelpshe’sbelligerentweneedtotranquilizeherorsomething!”

Every time she blinked, there was another person in a mask hovering over her bed. She felt a sting in her arm, but it was not the IV needle, and it would not kill her. The world turned dark. When at last she came to, her limbs were strapped to the bed. The pendant was still curled in her left hand.

It took days, but the world gradually slowed, and death seemed as much a door to Hell as life. Matt was the first person she had a normal conversation with after her infection.

“You really had us worried, there,” he said, still speaking a little faster than he should have been. “Your brother was telling us all along he thought the virus would make you hurt yourself. It’s downright eerie, but I think he was right. I think he had some kind of near-death revelation when that explosion went off, and now he knows things about the future.”

“Uh-huh,” she mumbled. Her throat felt dry; she had not spoken in a long time.

“We’ve got some blood samples from you to see if we can isolate some antibodies now that you're starting to fight off the virus. Might be able to develop a cure right here,” added Matt. “We took samples from your brother and sister, too, in case it’s a natural genetic immunity.”

She had heard “brother” and “sister” often among the speeding words spoken to her throughout the duration of her illness. As an only child, born to a mother who died shortly after her birth and a father whose whereabouts were unknown, this had perplexed her constantly.

“Who are you talking about?” she could finally ask. “What brother and sister?”

“Huh? Your… Diana? Sigma?” he asked. “Hey, is your memory okay? You’ve got a brother and sister. Sigma and Diana. Right?”

She frowned. “They’re not my… I just met them,” she insisted. “I just met them. We’re not…”

“Hon, we got their blood samples. You’re about a fifty-percent DNA match to both of them. Comes up on our computers now, it’s fancy stuff,” he said. “Listen, I’m gonna let you rest a little longer, okay? You sound like you’re a little tired.”

The last time she saw Matt, he had a dazed look in his eyes. She thought something was wrong, but she was still too weak to do anything.

“Honestly, I don’t care when they assign me to the Radical-6 ward," he rambled. “Everyone else is scared to come near you guys, but it’s nice and slow working with all of you. Everyone else is just… rushing around, shouting a lot, moving too fast. It’s getting overwhelming.”

His voice was starting to sound slow to her ears.

“They’re all scared of catching Radical-6 and dying,” he said. “Honestly, I… I don’t think I care, you know? It just kind of feels inevitable.”

She saw his facial hair for the first time, a neat goatee surrounded by an even layer of two or three days' stubble. He was not wearing his surgical mask.

“None of your blood samples had the antibodies we were looking for,” said the ragged nurse. “Weirdest thing, I never noticed before. Sigma and Diana… their DNA is a half match to yours, both of them… but they don’t match each other at all.”

This was starting not to sound so weird to Phi.

“Only thing I could figure, they’re both your half-siblings. One on your mom’s side, one on your dad’s,” he said. “Even then… a fifty-percent match with half-siblings is pretty high. Is that what it is, though?”

She did not answer.

“Too bad we couldn’t find the cure," said Matt. "Maybe someday. Maybe not. Maybe… we’re all doomed.” He laughed once. “This might sound weird, but it kind of feels good to say that.”

A different nurse, wearing more protective clothing than Matt had ever donned, told Phi when she was clear of the virus and free to leave the quarantine. “I can give you the address for the hospital where we transferred your brother,” she said. “He’s doing much better these days. Physical therapy with the prosthetics is going well. It’s probably a good time to visit him, I’m sure he’d love to see you.”

On her way out, a receptionist passed her a slip of paper with the address. Behind the desk, she crumpled it in her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can people actually naturally recover from Radical-6? The alternative is that Phi survives it for three and a half months before she jumps into a treatment pod in the middle of April, which seems like an unreasonably long time to resist death. But if she recovers, then the antibodies can be harvested months after the outbreak occurs, rather than a decade later. Argh!!! I love fixating on minuscule and largely irrelevant details in narratives!!
> 
> Anyway, the last chapter will take another week or so maybe so I can make sure you get your maximum Kyle Klim justice.


	4. Chapter 4

And then Sigma woke up again.

He smelled verdancy on the mechanical breeze. For the first time in months, he could feel with his arms—the softness of earth, the tickle of grass—though he knew the sensation, and even the garden itself, was artificial. Forty-five years ago, he had slipped out of this old body with the weight of a woman on his chest. He woke up in almost the same way.

“Miss Phi, are you okay?”

The voice was a punch from a distant past. Even after half a century, he recognized Quark’s voice, but he almost did not recognize Phi’s. He could only tell that it was a woman softly crying. Phi did not cry. Nothing got under her skin, and even if it did, she would be angry long before she dared to shed a tear.

Sigma blinked his eyes open. The camera in his right eye shuttered in response to his will. Only if he concentrated could he detect a different in sensation between the two. Many long, late hours had been poured into designing an eye that would fool his younger self. Both organic and bionic swiveled and focused on the girl hovering over his body, tears dripping from her chin to his chest.

“Phi?” he breathed. “What are you doing?”

It was all he could think to ask. Her quivering lips twisted into a grimace. She raised a hand like she was going to hit him, but it curled into a weak fist and fell limp at her side. Her shoulders shuddered.

She had already cried like this when she finally summoned the courage to visit Crash Keys in 2029. On her way to the treatment pod for a forty-five-year sleep, she glimpsed Sigma at rest. His empty eye socket was covered with a black patch. The naked titanium boning of his robotic arms poked out from under his sleeves. His skin had already faded to a paler shade, and his face was thinner.

Diana’s face had been just as sallow, and her eyes were red at the corners. Only her warm, strangely familiar embrace could quell Phi’s sobbing. She brushed the tears from Phi’s cheek, smiling warmly under sad, blue eyes. “We wouldn’t want those to freeze to your face, right?” she laughed gently. “Well, I’ll… I’ll see you.”

Diana knew what would become of her, and Phi knew of her absence on Rhizome-9 in 2074. They deluded each other with this happy thought anyway, as Phi stepped into the remaining empty treatment pod. Sigma did not wake as the pod door wheezed open and shut, sending her body into a long, cold sleep.

When next she saw him in the garden on the moon, he was even thinner, weaker, and, of course, much older. This was a body battered by forty-five years of suffering that Phi herself had caused. Wracked with guilt and shattered by pity, she wept.

She cast her teary eyes about the botanical garden, locking onto each person whose life had been destroyed by the AB Project. Alice and Clover, ripped from the past and dropped into a desolate future; Luna, helpless to resist the orders to act against her ethics; Quark, subjected to terrors a child should never witness; Junpei Tenmyouji, doomed to wander the Earth for his elusive someone; Akane, who had to leave the one she loved for a future they would never see; and Sigma, indentured to a prison sentence on the moon in endless toil for a chance to save humanity, only for Phi to waltz in and ruin everything.

“This is my fault.”

Something struck Sigma in the chest when Phi spoke those words in a voice weakened by tears. They were some of Diana’s last words to both Sigmas: before he SHIFTed to this future, and before she died forty-two years ago on Rhizome-9. He shot upright—too quickly, his elderly back clicked twice as he moved—and placed his hands on Phi’s shoulders, ducking his head to look in her red eyes. She avoided his gaze, biting her lip.

“This isn't anybody’s fault, Phi,” he stated. “It’s not yours, it’s not mine, and it wasn’t… it wasn’t hers, either. Zero was the one who set this up. All of us were just pawns.”

Phi was inconsolable. The tears rolled down her cheeks in thick bands, no matter how hard she gritted her teeth. “You worked so hard,” she hiccupped, “all these years, for… for _nothing_.”

“It wasn’t for nothing, Phi,” he said, his low voice turning into a growl.

He did not want to be angry at her. If he was angry at anyone, it was himself, for failing to save everyone from Radical-6 like he was supposed to, for not realizing that it was inevitable that he _would_ fail.

“This history has always existed. What does that tell you?” he asked, his tone menacing. “We already _lived_ this. That means some version of us had to fail. We needed to retroactively cause this timeline to exist somewhere.”

Logic did nothing to comfort Phi. She pressed her hands to her eyes and sat back on her heels, saying the same thing Sigma had been thinking for the past three and a half months: “But why did it have to be _us_?”

He still had no answer to that. The best he could do was to pull her close to his chest.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Lacking the energy to show her affection, she let her body fall limp in his embrace, save for the last shudders of her sobs. Their fellow participants in the second Nonary Game, frozen in time for those forty-five years of mental time travel, were filtering out of the B. Garden. Even Akane had abandoned them, probably to receive questions to which Sigma and Phi no longer needed answers.

“Did you ever figure out who I was?” Phi asked in a weak voice.

“What do you mean, who you are?”

She shook her head against his shirt. “I don’t have all the pieces,” she mumbled. “I probably had it wrong, if Akane never told you anything. Never mind.”

“Phi, what are you talking about?”

He touched her head, first wanting to pull her face away from his chest to get a look in her eyes, but he let his fingers settle in her hair when its softness felt impossibly familiar.

“I don’t know why I want it to be true,” she said. “K said—Kyle said you were…”

Sigma’s insides went pitch black at the sound of Kyle’s name. His years on the moon were an empty haze of endless toil, all supposedly towards a greater future. Dreams of that future were what propelled the doctor forward, what chained him to his work when the monotony of a lonely life in space drained all other motivation. When it came time to create his spare, even Kyle blended into that sea of projects. Sigma saw that Kyle was cared for, that he had what he needed and even what he desired where it was possible. However, having divorced himself mentally from this doomed timeline in anticipation of the greater future, having buried himself in science and robotics and puzzles to keep his sanity, Sigma never made time to give Kyle what he truly deserved: unabashed, unconditional love.

His eyes locked on treatment pod 00 with a mix of reverence and shame. Phi slipped down his chest as he rose onto his shaky legs. Kyle had a softer face than Sigma at that age, or perhaps his expression was gentler. He was and was not a perfect clone of Sigma Klim. In one sense, he was not perfect, because he was not an exact replica of the original. In another sense, he was perfect, because he was everything Sigma ever was, but better. He should have had all of the love in the world, love like Akane could give, like Diana would have given, but he should have felt it from the man in whose lifeless eyes he was only another part of the project.

Sigma was lifting Kyle from the pod before he realized what he was doing. The moon’s gravity made Kyle a comfortable weight in his arms. His skin and clothes were still cool to touch from his time in cold sleep. Sigma stood in a daze for a few moments, running his eyes over his son’s angelic face.

“I can’t ever go back,” he uttered. “What’s done is… is done. I’ve lost all of those years.”

Against his arm, he felt the Phi’s warmth. “Just have to keep looking forward, right?” she sighed.

Sigma was just as easy to find crying as Phi, even before forty-five years of near-isolation had beaten his emotions into a tired, dry husk somewhere at the bottom of his heart. His eyes burned as they filled after such a long dry spell.

“Do you know what I’ve done to this child?” he uttered.

“H-hey, c’mon, Sigma,” Phi said nervously. “Let’s… let’s get him to his bedroom or something, alright?” She grabbed hold of Kyle’s legs. “Or maybe we should take him to the infirmary, since he’s all drugged up.”

Sigma’s bionic arms kept Kyle securely in his hold. A tear rolled down his withered cheek.

“He was a child,” he said, his voice thin. “He wasn’t just an experiment. I made a _child_. And I…”

“I know. C’mon.” When it was clear Sigma would not let go of his son, she started pushing against his shoulder in the direction of the exit. “You said it yourself, what’s done is done. Moping about it isn’t gonna do you any good.”

“I just… I just wanted to make a better world.” His voice broke. “I was so focused on escaping this timeline, I… _Kyle_ …”

“I’m gonna slap you if you don’t snap out of it,” Phi warned, shaking his arm. “I’m not even the one who needs to hear this. Let’s get him to the infirmary.”

It was not her first sentence, but her second that finally got Sigma to stop his running mouth. “I can take him,” he sighed.

“Well, I’m going with you whether I’m helping you carry him or not. Your call.”

He shrugged his arms to bring Kyle closer to his chest. Phi shrugged, as well.

“Did you… want kids?” she asked as they walked, keeping her voice low for fear of someone lurking around the corner. “Or was it really just for the project?”

He echoed a smile he saw in his mind, a smile forty-two years gone, but brought back for a few precious months. “I don’t really know,” he murmured. “They were necessary elements of the project, first and foremost, but both of them were like my children. Maybe I did want kids and I… kept myself too busy to admit it.”

Phi jogged ahead a few steps to call the elevator. “Who else was like a child to you?” she asked.

Sigma blinked. “Oh… Luna,” he said, and he smiled again. “Adding training data to refine her algorithms was a little like teaching a child. Not to mention, she was… more naïve. I only realized after I went back to 2028.” He twisted his body to fit himself and Kyle through the elevator door. “Maybe it was all just a projection of her in the end.”

He felt Phi against his arm again. “She was special,” she said softly. “It’s hard to build someone like her from scratch. She was special.”

“She was special.”

The elevator opened on Floor A and they almost forgot to leave.

“What if you… _did_ have a biological child? Somehow?” Phi asked, pinching at the skin on her thin arms. She kept her pace just behind Sigma’s, glancing at the walls and the floor in case he decided to turn around and meet her eyes.

“I’m not sure what you’re asking,” he said. “Kyle is as biologically identical to me as a human can possibly be. That alone tells me how little genetics has to do with family.”

For a few strides, Sigma did not notice that Phi had stopped walking. When he looked over his shoulder, she had the frilled edges of her skirt gathered in two tiny fists. Staring at the ground, she forced out the words she wanted to say.

“What if she _wanted_ to be part of your family?”

In the thick, heavy silence, Phi struggled to lift her head, to keep her eyes trained on Sigma’s gaping stare. Her fists were clenched so tightly that her hands began to shake. Her lips burned from the pressure of keeping her mouth in a straight line.

“Phi, who are you?” Sigma asked in a hoarse voice.

She crossed her arms and thrust her head to the side. “Just—put him in the infirmary, and… and we’ll talk.”

The talking barely happened. After they sequestered themselves in the office of Zero Sr., Phi managed to say, “I figured some things out over the past three and a half months,” and those were the only words they exchanged for the next five minutes. The rest of it was holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes, finding the similarities in their features. The sharp, incisive gaze, the pointed chin, the angled brows. Sigma saw where her features gave way to someone else’s, and that was when the words began again.

“Is your mother…”

“Uh-huh.”

“How? _When?_ ”

“I don’t know. I just…” She shook her head. “I know that’s what it is. There’s no other explanation.”

“You’re _twenty_ ,” he protested. “She was twenty-six when we…”

“Maybe I came from some other universe.”

“You can’t SHIFT your whole body to a new universe.” As he said it, Akane’s wry smile nagged at thoughts, like she was keeping a secret from him.

“Well, somehow, I did. And here I am.” Phi gripped his hands too tightly. “Here we are.”

He gazed at their clasped hands. “Here we are.”

They were never supposed to end up here, but they were always supposed to end up here. Their minds ran in vain over the choices that had led to this reality, as they had run for desolate months, watching as the virus gripped the nation, then the world. They remembered a million mistakes, a million moments where if someone had done something just a bit differently, the pieces would not have fallen into place. Sigma wished he had not wasted his time on the selfish notion of last words before he tried to disarm the bomb. Phi wished she had noticed the syringe in Mira’s hand, had not closed her eyes to hold back tears of grief.

They had survived for forty-five years, which was more than they could say for the selves they had abandoned in timelines where they made different mistakes. Akane had promised Sigma that a perfect future did emerge from the Decision Game, but in a dark corner of her mind, Phi believed that, after all of the deaths she escaped to get here, this remaining timeline was the best of her possible futures. Radical-6 had a cure. Sigma got three happy years with the woman he loved. He and Phi were alive and together.

“I… I meant what I said before,” she said in a soft voice. “About… wanting to be a part…”

A hollow laugh escaped Sigma’s dry throat. The proposition sounded like a joke to his ears. “Aren’t you sick of me by now?” he asked.

“No!”

She didn’t mean to shout, but that was how the word burst from her lips as she squeezed Sigma’s hand with both of hers.

“Pioneer of genetic engineering and robotics and whatever else the hell,” she muttered to herself, shooting a stare to the side. “You’re still dense as a bag of bricks. We’re… we’re a team, Sigma. Whether I’m your weird, interdimensional lovechild or not. And I…”

“Phi, I’m sixty-seven years old.”

She forgot how to inhale for a moment.

“You’re twenty.” His hand went limp in her grasp. “Do the math. It won’t take long till our team is a solo act.”

“Can it with the doom and gloom, Sigma!” she snapped. “You’re not dead yet. Which is a goddamn miracle, after everything you’ve been through.”

“I’m just saying, if you’re looking for a teammate, there’s a younger version of me walking around here who’s better than me in every way, and he can tell you how shitty I—”

“But he’s not _you_.”

Her arms lashed out to get behind the doctor’s back and hold him close.

“And maybe I want my teammate to be my… my old man.”

Sigma’s arms faltered at first when he tried to circle them around Phi. He felt unworthy of the extraordinary girl leaning against his chest, the SHIFTing, face-kicking science whiz who wanted to call him her father.

“But Kyle can be on the team, too, if you want. I like him.”

Sigma sighed to try to expel the weight in his chest. “Kyle will never forgive me,” he uttered.

“Maybe not. But he still loves you.” Phi looked up with a soft smile. “You can’t get those years back, but you can make a change going forward.”

“I’m not cut out for this,” he mumbled. “She— _she’d_ know what to do. She’d be able to…”

“Alright, fine. We’ll get Luna on the team, too.” After giving him a jab in the shoulder, Phi rolled back from the balls of her feet, folding her hands behind her back while she wore a saccharine smile. “You can’t back out of this, _Dad_.”

Sigma let one weak laugh leave his lips. “That’s the full gambit of the messed-up Klim family,” he said. “The real kid, the robot kid, and the clone kid. I’m all kinds of Dad.”

“You have way too many kids for someone who never had kids.”

“What if there’s more I don’t know about?” he wondered. “Like you. More alternate univer—”

“ _God_ , I hope not. I’m cutting you off, Sigma.”

“Alright, alright. Just three kids. Just the… the three most important kids in my life,” sighed Sigma. “Let’s make this timeline ours.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and then they lived happily ever after, _so help me god_
> 
> thanks for reading!


	5. BONUS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahaha whoops i came back to this and made it asymmetrical

And then Diana woke up.

She did so with a gasp, as a terrible roar filled her ears that rattled the bed underneath her. She reached beside her, but her hand hit empty sheets. Sigma was no longer there. She leapt onto the trembling ground, huffing and puffing as she raced to the front room of the bunker, to the treatment pods, to the shabby cot in which Sigma slept alone these days, waiting for his fate to fully claim him.

He was not sleeping now. He sat up at the edge of his bed, his gaunt face cast in a harsh light from the window he stared at in wide-eyed horror. Akane watched the scene unfold like she watched everything these days: with deep melancholy and without a hint of surprise, no matter what happened.

Diana held her breath to keep the sound of her panting from disturbing their stillness. She took slow, soft steps forward to bring the outside world into her line of sight. Despite all of the times Sigma had muttered about the nuclear reactors going off in the middle of April, she still gasped violently when she saw the mushroom cloud expanding in the distance.

Sigma jumped at the sound, nearly falling off his bed as he tried to whirl around. His eye locked on Diana with a fear that slowly faded into confusion. That was when Diana knew it had happened.

“Oh, Sigma,” Akane said, trying to smile. “This is—”

“Luna?” he asked.

Diana cocked her head, looking to Akane for an explanation, only to witness her flinch as if startled. After months of her eerie cognizance, the sight was jarring.

“This is Diana,” she corrected, then took in a deep breath to steady herself.

Diana had practiced smiling through pain for months, while reports of Radical-6 grew more frequent and more panicked, while Sigma bemoaned his failure to save the world from apocalypse, while he stared in disgust at his robotic fingers with only one eye, while he talked about how he would be leaving soon, but it was alright, his younger self would come back, he would be a little rough around the edges, in different ways than she was used to, but they would be alright, he would take care of her, he would be good to her, it would still be him, just younger, he was so lucky he got to see her again before he left, it would be okay, Diana, he promised.

“It’s… nice to meet you, Sigma,” Diana said with that practiced smile, but as her cheeks rose, she felt a tear roll out of her eye.

Sigma’s face fell. His body gave a jerk like he wanted to stand, but he stayed still. He sent a nervous glance to Akane, whom he found gazing expectantly at him instead, until she came to her senses with a small shake of her head, and came to Diana’s side. Sigma could no longer be the one to comfort her while she cried.

“Are you okay?” he asked softly, breaking into a higher register in a boyish way, a way the old Sigma had never used his voice.

“N-no, no, I’m fine,” Diana lied, rubbing her eyes while Akane laid an inhuman hand on her shoulder in the physical semblance of comfort.

“She’s been through a lot, that’s all,” Akane said. “About as much as you have, you could say.”

Sigma’s eye went wide as his eyebrows drew together. He was so much more expressive now. Gone was the constant impassive grimace, replaced by earnest displays of empathy and caring. He was finally as young as his face suggested.

“I have some arrangements to make before our departure,” Akane said. Her hand left Diana’s shoulder. “Let me know if you need anything.”

She had no more arrangements to make. The only thing she was arranging was a moment of privacy between two strangers who were supposed to be in love.

“How are you feeling?” Diana asked in a weak voice, folding her hands in front of her skirt. She noticed a wrinkle in it when her eyes fell to her feet. A tug at the fabric did not set it straight.

“I’m fine,” Sigma said with a shrug. His lower lip jutted out a bit as he said it. He raised and lowered one robotic hand. “Been better, I guess.”

“Does that feel well-calibrated to you?” Diana asked, squeezing her hands together even more tightly. “It seemed to be working well for, um, Dr. Klim, but if it feels off to you, I know a little bit about how the electronics work now, so I could…”

“Oh, shit.” Sigma clenched his teeth as the left corner of his lips stretched open in disgust. “It’s April, right? And I got grabbed in December. You had to deal with my weird older self all that time?”

Diana blinked in surprise.

“God, I can’t believe I turn _into_ that nut,” he grumbled. “Pretentious asshole who dicks around talking about termites instead of telling you anything actually important.” He paused when he tried to cross his arms and found it difficult to maneuver how metal should lie against metal.

“Um,” Diana said hesitantly, “termites?”

Sigma rolled his eye. “Termites,” he confirmed. “He made a hologram recording of himself for me to find and just told me about termites for an hour before going, ‘By the way, here’s the password to deactivate the second bomb,’ which was actually my first warning that there were _any_ bombs around, and then he just signs off like it’s fine! _Asshole_. And he dresses like a tool, too.”

Diana giggled. The older Sigma had complained about his younger self’s wardrobe selection, with different words and a different temperament, but with much the same feeling.

“You know about the whole jumping timeline stuff, right?” Sigma asked. “Sorry, just assumed, since you’re here and all…”

“Oh! Yes, I… I think I understand it,” she replied. “Not everything, but… I know you’re the younger Sigma now.”

“I’m the _normal_ Sigma,” he grumbled. “I’m only _kind_ of an asshole. And I’m usually kidding when I’m being an asshole.”

He slid over to make room for her to sit beside him on the bed, giving her a gentle half-smile.

“Diana, right?” he asked. “How’d Akane rope you into this mess, anyway?”

Her knees shook as she lowered herself to the mattress. She swallowed and gave a vague answer: “I worked with your older self to develop these treatment pods.”

His eyebrows shot up and he looked over his shoulder at the three frosty pods. “No kidding,” he said. “So you’re a robotics person, too? This and the arms.”

“No, no, _you_ were the robotics expert,” Diana insisted, blushing despite herself. “I was just the medical consult. I’m a nurse.”

She had gotten a wide variety of reactions to that fact in her short career, but the young Sigma’s stood out among them all. His eye went wide, then squinted, and then he said, “That’s… weird.”

“W-weird?” she stammered.

“No, not—it’s just—wait.”

At least one facial expression had not changed after forty-five years. Sigma still narrowed his eyes and flicked them about when the gears were turning in his head.

“Are you… coming with us?” he asked. “To…”

“To the Moon,” she finished, nodding.

“Okay,” he said, but he sounded like it was not okay. “Sorry, just… I think I’m figuring out way too much stuff about my older self. About what he, uh, gets up to on the Moon and all.”

“You’re the one who’s going to get up to things on the Moon,” Diana corrected. “You’re figuring out something about your own future.”

“Oh, hell, that’s worse,” Sigma groaned. He almost poked out his remaining eye when he tried to hold his face in his spindly hands. “Listen, Diana, you gotta stop me from turning into that guy. If I start doing the weird shit he does, you gotta stop me. I mean—” He snapped his head back up. “If you’re… staying, right? You’re coming to the Moon for keeps or just for a little while?”

There was a cautious hopefulness in his expression as he turned towards her. “For keeps,” she replied, smiling. “That’s the plan, anyway.”

She did not miss the smile that flickered onto his face before he fell back to business. “So you worked with the old fart enough to know what he’s like, right?” he continued. “If I do _anything_ like him, just, just _punch_ me. At least we can maybe hold off my inevitable douchebaggery until the very end, and I can be a regular, non-asshole Sigma until then.”

Diana giggled again. She let the giggles give way to honest laughter.

“You’re very different from him,” she agreed, “but you’re definitely the same person. I can’t really put my finger on it, but there’s just something about you… maybe…” She frowned over the word she found, but said it anyway. “You’re both so… determined?”

“Determined to be an asshole,” he grumbled of his older incarnation.

“He really is kind,” Diana insisted, wringing her hands. “He… can be a bit brusque, I guess, if you don’t know him well, but… I know he’s a kind person. And I can tell that about you, too.”

Sigma stared, dumbfounded, long after Diana had finished speaking. She wrung her hands more vigorously.

“Yeah, I can see it in you, too,” he finally said, wearing a small smile. “It’s… in your eyes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you feel like this ends abruptly then maybe you weren't murdered directly in the heart by luna when you played vlr but that's a line she says to sigma.


End file.
